When General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile on 11 September 1973, Alan Phillips, who has died of cancer aged 76, immediately began to explore ways to support students and academics in the South American country who were being imprisoned, tortured and displaced by the regime.
As the general secretary of World University Service UK (WUS), working with a network of academics in the UK and Chile, Alan presented the incoming Labour government in 1974 with a proposal: that part of the British government’s aid budget for Chile should be reallocated to a humanitarian and social development programme supporting academics from Chile in the UK. With the backing of the then minister for overseas development, Judith Hart, a programme was put in place that would eventually benefit around 900 award holders and their families living in danger in Chile.
A WUS grant secured the release from prison of Salvador Allende’s former education minister, Edgardo Enríquez Frödden, whose two sons and son-in-law had been murdered by the regime. Arriving in the UK with his remaining family in 1975, Enríquez commenced a fellowship at Oxford University, where he wrote a textbook on anatomy still used by medical students today.
Like many others, Enríquez would eventually return to Latin America under a WUS reorientation programme; by the 1990s the majority of award holders had returned to Chile, helping to rebuild democracy with the fall of Pinochet. For Ricardo Lagos, president of Chile from 2000 to 2006, who was involved with WUS from the outset, Alan’s role in initiating and guiding these projects “was of enormous importance in sustaining our academic community in exile and facilitating their return to Chile”. In 2010, the then president, Michelle Bachelet, made Alan a commander of the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins, the country’s highest honour for non-Chileans.
Born in Brighton, Alan was the son of Irene (nee Hennesy) and Reginald Phillips, who owned a hardware shop. At Brighton college he excelled at chess and debating, and came into his own at Warwick University in the initial cohort of physics students, beginning in 1966. In 1968 he was elected the first sabbatical president of the students’ union, and in his final year (1969-70), he combined a first with being elected to the university council, and representing students when university monitoring of student activists made headlines in the national press.
In 1970 Alan also married Hilary Siddell, a fellow Warwick student who became a teacher, and, declining to study for a PhD, he joined Rank Xerox as a systems analyst to gain practical management experience.
Despite access to the world’s most advanced computers and a comfortable salary, in 1973 he brought his skills as a scientist, analyst and student organiser to WUS, initiating and directing the Chile programme and scholarship initiatives in southern Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia/Eritrea, together with a transformative literacy campaign in Nicaragua.
I worked with Alan for a year on the initial phase of the WUS Chile programme, from 1974, and was impressed by his intellect, his understated manner that masked a tenacious resolve, his ease of communication with government ministers and students alike, and his exceptional organisational skills.
He spent seven years as the deputy director of the newly founded British Refugee Council (BRC), before being appointed as executive director of Minority Rights Group International in 1989. As with WUS and the BRC, he greatly extended the outreach of the NGO in combatting ethnic discrimination as a source of social injustice, commissioning reports worldwide and editing The World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, which became the main reference text in this field. This work helped inform the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities in 1992, which then inspired the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) three years later.
In 1998 Alan was appointed as the UK’s special expert to the Council of Europe’s advisory board on the FCNM, of which he became vice-president (1999-2002) then president (2006-10), monitoring the application of minority rights law in 39 countries of Europe. He insisted on visiting difficult-to-reach minority communities, such as an Albanian Roma one where he was first met with a barred door and rifles, until, thanks to Alan’s willingness to listen without judgment, the community flooded into the centre where he was speaking to share their stories of injustice and persecution.
Alan was made CMG in 1999, and in 2005 received an honorary doctorate from Warwick University.
Always keen to bring people together, he co-founded the Brighton and Hove Organic Gardening Group, chaired the Brighton and Hove Allotment Society and promoted “Seedy Sunday”, where local communities swap organic seeds up and down the country.
Alan is survived by Hilary, their three children, Alison, Simon and Jessica, and five grandchildren.
•Alan David John Phillips, international human rights adviser, born 4 April 1947; died 28 April 2023
